Meet Jay

Meet Jay Rajesh Thakkar, who is in business for himself, reads numbers for people on the side, and has spent a good part of his life on a garba floor.

Those three do not usually appear in the same sentence. In his case they are not even separate things — they are the same person taking an interest in whatever is in front of him and following it properly.

He is passionate about the arts and about garba. He loves films, music and travelling, and he has done enough of all three for them to count as part of who he is rather than as a way to pass a Sunday.

He is also an International Judge Coordinator, which is where the garba eventually took him.

What holds all of it together is a belief he states without hesitation: that success is a journey and never a destination.

A Gujarati business family

He comes from a traditional Gujarati business family on his father's side — the kind where business is not a career somebody chooses at twenty-two, but the air in the house from the beginning.

His mother is a homemaker. He has a sister, who is married.

It is a small description and a complete one, and it explains a good deal about how his own life went. In a family like that, business is not explained to you in a lecture. You absorb it. You hear the conversations at the table, you watch how a deal is discussed, you learn what a good year sounds like and what a bad one sounds like, long before anyone hands you anything to run.

By the time he had to decide what to do, he had been in the room for years already.

The one he loves the most

He has a daughter, and when he lists the people in his life he does not leave any doubt about where she sits. She is the one he loves the most.

He says it plainly, in the middle of answers that are otherwise about business and struggle and destiny, and it lands harder for being unadorned.

It is worth pausing on, because a man who describes his own life as a continuous struggle, and who believes that struggle is the point, is also telling you what the struggle has been for.

Everything else in this book — the business built up gradually, the years on the garba floor, the work that takes him across borders — happens around that one sentence.

Following his father

He did his undergraduate degree, and then he followed his father into business.

What he learnt there was two things at once: business itself, and property investment. The second came directly from his father, and it turned out to be something he genuinely enjoyed rather than merely inherited — which is the difference between a profession that fits and one that is endured.

He is careful about how he describes the start. Humble beginnings, and then a business developed gradually.

Both of those words are doing work. Humble, because he is not claiming he began with an advantage he did not have. Gradually, because he is not claiming it arrived quickly. What he is describing is the ordinary, unphotogenic version of building something, which is the version almost everybody actually lives and almost nobody puts in an interview.

Numbers, on the side

Alongside the business he is a numerologist.

He calls it a venture on the side, and he is clear about what he gets from it — the chance to help people. That is the reason he gives, and it is the only reason he gives.

It sits naturally beside the rest of him rather than against it. A man who believes that luck and blessings decide as much as effort does is not going to find numerology a strange thing to take seriously. For him it is of a piece with everything else he thinks about how a life actually turns out.

And it is the second thread in his life where somebody comes to him with a question and leaves with something useful. The first is business. This one just happens to be about a different kind of number.

Garba

Before the business grew and before anybody called him a coordinator, he was playing garba.

He does not present this as a hobby he kept up. He presents it as the beginning of a line that runs all the way to where he is now — his time from playing garba to reaching where he is today is, in his own words, an achievement in itself.

That is a genuinely unusual sentence from a businessman. Most people in business would nominate a deal. He nominates a dance form he loves, and the distance he has travelled inside it.

It also says something about how he measures a life. Not by what a thing earns, but by how far it took him and who he became on the way.

Raas Rang, and Jeetubhai

The turning point he names is an opportunity, and the opportunity was Raas Rang.

Getting to work with Raas Rang was, as he describes it, an amazing opportunity. And the part he returns to is not the platform itself but the person — being able to learn from someone like Jeetubhai, which he counts as a blessing rather than as a break.

That distinction matters to him. A break is something you are given and then use. A blessing is something you are grateful for.

Most turning points, when people describe them, are about a door opening. His is about who was standing on the other side of it. Given how much of his philosophy rests on learning from everyone you meet, that is exactly where you would expect him to put the emphasis.

From the floor to the table

Today he works as an International Judge Coordinator — the role that garba eventually grew into.

He mentions it the way he mentions most things about himself, which is briefly and with the credit pointed elsewhere: it is part of the journey, and it happened with god's grace.

But consider the shape of the line. A man who started out playing garba because he loved it now holds a position in how it is judged, internationally. The love came first and the role came after, which is the right order and far rarer than it sounds.

Nothing about that was planned at the beginning. He was not building towards a title. He was doing a thing he was passionate about, for years, and the thing made room for him.

What struggle is for

Ask him about his biggest challenge and he does not pick one.

His life in general, he says, has always been a struggle — and then he adds, almost in the same breath, that without struggle life is boring.

He has a clear view of what it gives back. Struggle teaches you the importance of the good friends and the family around you, because that is when you find out who is there. It teaches you your true potential, and how far you can actually push yourself towards greater heights.

This is not the version where hardship is repackaged as a gift. He is not pretending it was pleasant. He is saying it was useful, and that he would rather have had it than not.

Coming from somebody who describes his whole life that way, it reads less like a slogan and more like a conclusion.

Why working hard is not enough

Here he says something that most people in business will not say out loud.

He is a big believer in destiny. And on his reading, struggle and hard work alone are never enough — luck, blessings and god's grace matter just as much in whether somebody arrives anywhere.

It is an unfashionable position. The whole language of modern success is built on the opposite claim: that effort is the only variable and anybody who did not make it simply did not want it enough.

He does not accept that, and there is a generosity in refusing it. If effort were the only thing that counted, then everybody who struggled and did not arrive would have only themselves to blame. His view leaves room for them.

It also keeps him honest about his own position, which he describes throughout as something he was granted rather than something he extracted.

Karma

What he believes, in the end, comes down to one idea he keeps returning to.

He is a great believer in karma: that whatever good you do for others comes back to you as blessings and as good. Be honest. Work hard. Be kind and helpful to everyone.

And then the part that is easy to read past — try to learn more and more from everyone you meet in life, because life is a journey of learning in every aspect. Not from mentors. From everyone.

Ask him who to thank and the list is short and specific. His Kul Devi, Maa Momai. His family. His friends. No institutions, no industry names — the people and the faith that were there for the struggle he describes as having been there all along.

Success is a journey and never a destination.